Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) was an accomplished librarian, historian, editor, poet, critic, and novelist. His diverse occupations were unified by the common goal of forwarding a social and intellectual ...
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"Time," wrote Arna Bontemps in his sixty-sixth year, "is not a river. Time is a pendulum." Certainly this black writer's voluminous contributions in literature and history support that theory and are ...
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Poet, critic, playwright, novelist, historian, educator, librarian, writer of children's books, Arna Bontemps was also a voracious reader, devoted family man, pioneering Afro-American literary figure,...
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Critical Essay by W.e.b. Dubois
Arna Bontemps' first venture in fiction ["God Sends Sunday"] is to me a profound disappointment. It is of the school of "Nigger Heaven...
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Critical Essay by Richard Wright
In that limited and almost barren field known as the Negro novel, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder fills a yawning gap and fills it competently. Covering all thos...
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Critical Essay by Hugh M. Gloster
God Sends Sunday follows Nigger Heaven in its emphasis upon sex and fast living, but differs in its introduction of a main character who is a celebrated jockey and a...
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Critical Essay by Dorothy Weil
[Black Thunder] is a superior piece of work. Interest in the action is sustained; the minds and feelings of the blacks are made lucid and believable; and the atmosphere...
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Critical Essay by Brian Neal Odell
Purporting to be a biography of [Frederick] Douglass, Free at Last reads more like a novel. Emphasized throughout are the protagonist's secret musings, the a...
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Critical Essay by Arthur P. Davis
Bontemps' poems [collected in Personals] make use of several recurring themes: the alien-and-exile allusions so often found in New Negro poetry; strong racial...
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Critical Essay by Don David Guttenplan
This collection of more than forty years of correspondence [Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters (1925–1967)] is a delight….
[There] is...
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Critical Essay by Nathan Irvin Huggins
[The letters in "Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters 1925–1967"] were written without any awareness that they might be read by whi...
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Critical Essay by Mary Helen Washington
[Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters 1925–1967 constitutes] a kind of collective authority. In surveying the American literary scene for a half...
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